Linda Somers Smith and Masters Marathon Training

Training adjustments that might help runners of all ages run faster marathons

When Linda Somers Smith talks about making the transition from Olympic marathoner to record-setting masters athlete, she admits to taking forced steps back from the training she did in her prime, but also expresses the thought that doing things the way she does now might have served her better all along. "The biggest change I have made in the last few years is mileage. I just cannot train at the mileage typically expected with marathon training," says the full-time attorney from California, whose 2:36:33 in Los Angeles last March was only 6 minutes slower than her lifetime best from the 1996 Olympic marathon trials. "If I go over 70 miles a week, my body just rebels. It doesn't matter how slow the miles are; I just can't do them." Noting that she focuses largely on speed and, to a lesser extent, strength, Somers Smith, who also blasted a 1:13:31 at the San Jose Half Marathon last fall at 49, says that she runs "very, very slow" on her easy days, and does recovery runs alone so as not to risk running faster than she should. "On easy days, I don't wear a watch or worry about my pace," she says. "I just do my loop and that's it."

Despite being highly successful over an unlikely span of years, Somers Smith ponders whether the recipe that got her to the 1996 Games was ideal. "My biggest regret is that I labeled myself a marathoner early on and never stepped out of that mentality," she admits. "I was, like many marathon runners, a slave to miles and believed there was no reason to work on speed." She also asks herself the same things many runners do – questions that life makes unanswerable because none of us gets a do-over. "I don't know if all the miles in my 20s and 30s solidified my base, or whether I should have not done as many miles then. As a masters [runner], you have to change things around and can't grind out mile after mile at the same pace. This was probably true when I was younger, but I just didn't figure it out."

In other words, for masters marathoners, continuing to learn and apply what works best is as big a part of remaining competitive as is physical durability and mental determination. Mix in the increased pressure and willingness to maintain healthy "little" habits you may have let slide in your 20s and 30s, and you may be on the way to approaching or even exceeding your peak at 26.2 miles after the age of 40, especially, but not exclusively, if you got a later start.

DISPROPORTIONATE DISTANCE

When most longtime or older marathoners like Somers Smith give their training logs a good look, a common theme emerges: a dearth of genuine and varied speed work, either as a consequence of lots and lots of mileage or as a result of conscious prioritization. Even many of those who have been at it for a long time and rarely eschewed the weekly intervals they carried from their high school and college days into their early forays into marathon training have come to neglect old reliables, such as a hard set of 400s or 800s, in favor of exquisite specialization geared around the idea that training for 26.2-mile races is a beast unto itself. While that may in large part be true, as with everything in sport and in life, the reality is more nuanced than that.

Even as runners and coaches have made an honest effort to refine rather than replace when assembling workout schedules, certain types of faster running have been given increasingly less attention, often to the point of being rendered expendable for those past certain arbitrary age milestones.

The key to fixing this problem lies in two chief planning considerations: consciously integrating an ordered series of workouts bearing a specific purpose and reformulating the seven-day cycle. Together, these help ensure that masters marathoners regularly touch on all manner of speeds, from faster-than-5K race pace to goal marathon clip, with nothing sacrificed and the right emphasis placed on each.

Experienced coaches agree that this no-stones-unturned approach is, even for "marathon specialists," a genuine necessity. "My view is that the starting point for training is preparation for 15K to half marathon races – say, 50 minutes to 80 minutes for many experienced runners," says Pete Pfitzinger, a two-time Olympic marathoner and exercise physiologist who has coached masters marathoners from the recreational to the near-elite. "Then you adjust in one direction for shorter races and the other direction for longer races. Only the proportions [given to various types of workouts] really change for performance in a marathon."

"I'm a strong believer in what I call full-spectrum training," offers fellow exercise physiologist and columnist Greg McMillan, who heads up the Flagstaff , Ariz.-based McMillan Elite training group but counts over-40 runners as 95 percent of his many private coaching clients. "Runners should do workouts with all four key zones–endurance, stamina, speed and sprint." The emphasis shifts, he explains, based on the demands of the goal event, but notes that every training program should have at least some workouts from each training zone. "There are many, many physiological and psychological benefits for marathoners to perform workouts outside of the marathon-specific training," he says.